I don’t subscribe to the “blame the player” slant myself. Players do have some unreasonable expectations now but they’ve also been disappointed over and over again. It is a vicious cycle for sure. I can’t blame some folks for being cynical though.

It would, in my mind, be better to get a few things completely right at launch. Players would accept this as long as developers communicated clearly what their plan was for the long term and executed in a timely fashion. The patch cycle has gotten so long these days it is almost laughable when you see the pay off. Who hasn’t heard “We waited 3+ months for this?!” I know I hear it all the time.

Do things right when you can and make sure your players know what your goal is. I see communication as the biggest issue in the industry these days. If development was a little more transparent we’d be happier players. The whole argument of “if we say anything everyone expects exactly that and tries to hold us to some notion” is tiresome. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver and grow a thicker skin if you end up falling short!

I totally agree with you about making it all jell I do have have some hope with you guys tho….. As close mouthed as you’ve been about Copernicus, it’s obvious you have a very focused team

It’s interesting to see in retrospect how wrong Furor was. Lucky for him that he got hired at Blizzard to be a part of WoW.

I find it also interesting that Brad McQuaid when he learned that Furor landed a job at Blizzard, once made the comment that he would have hired Furor on the spot if he knew he was looking for a job in the MMO industry.

Given what happened to Sigil and Vanguard, chances are that Furor would probably now be designing quests for Free Realms or some other SOE product. Lucky for him he chose Blizzard over Sigil.

Beautifully summed up. Games like AoC and WAR, IMO, suffered because of a few small weaknesses rather than any single huge gapping flaw.

To be honest, players have ruined many games for me. So have design elements. Sometimes design elements have been created or modified to deal with certain players…griefers for example. If I’m wrong, I’m sure Moorgard will say something…but at some point in development the team looks at a component or feature and says, “Now…how can asshats ruin this?” “Will asshats ruin this feature for other players?” And that’s too bad. It’s a reality of design, but still too bad. But changes are made. That’s just a quick example, but there are definitely ways that the “customer” shares in some of the blame.

@Owlchick – LOL. Getting people excited about your game and leading them on are two different things. On the Mortal Online site they state – “…you and your allies will be able to rule an entire nation.” Well, we damn well better be able to. But we were told this before when we were told we could capture and sack our enemy’s city. But Mortal Online does have a decent explanation of what you can expect in the game. None of this…”Choose from thousands of skills to be the ultimate adventurer ever!!!” kind of crap. Of course, hype is subjective. I try to go into games with an open mind. Many do not. Message boards are filled with posts like “I thought it would be like this…”, “If they just…”, “The devs said…”, and the ever popular “I’ve redesigned your combat system for you…”

I think there are only a few ways to know, one would be the Blizzard way where you take what works with competitiors games and simply refine it, and the other is to be able to have the time once everything is together to iterate over it to find how things work together best.

So Snebli is correct in saying that given another full year, Vanguard probably could have been more successful.

Of course sometimes even that is not enough, as ‘fun’ and ‘entertaining’ are subjective and it all depends on the designers point of view.

Bad ideas with execution sell and still make a profit. Good ideas without execution do not sell.

It’s weird how I did read your article the first time, but got so focused on the one point that is shaded everything else you said.

No problem. Does this phenomenon have a name? Because it’s the cause for about half the fights that happen on message boards.

I have no issue with anyone who feels Vanguard is the best MMO for them. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I realized while working in record stores that any album you pick up is somebody’s favorite record–it’s all about what resonates with the individual.

@Snebli – One of the reasons we’ve been so careful about releasing information is that we don’t want to create a community obsessing about small details too early. It just gets unhealthy if you say too much before you can actually show what your product actually is.